"Best hotel in Porto for design lovers Breakfast here isn’t just breakfast; it’s proof of how brilliant Portuguese design is right now. Elegantly tapered knives and forks, jade-green ceramics holding quince jelly, a chalky-white espresso cup indented with abstract patterns—all handcrafted by family-run ateliers. The rest of the hotel takes a similar outlook. In the plant-lined entrance, clay faces grimace and grin down at guests—gods on one side, earthly mortals on the other—the work of sculptor João Pedro Rodrigues, alluding to Portugal’s Age of Discovery. Paying impressionistic homage to that era, three floors of high-windowed bedrooms riff on Africa, the Americas, and Asia with tactile compositions of raffia, cane, silk, leafy greens and Atlantic blues, a roar of tiger print. All about are heavily textured paintings by Jorge Curval—a black-and-white portrait of a gentleman in mustache and bicorne hat; a thick-daubed woman smoking a paint brush. Climb to the top banister, peer down at the patterned tiles, and it feels like watching a Portuguese Downton Abbey. When it comes to the country’s post-millennium boom, Lisbon gets most of the column inches but Porto is just as exciting, and this is an apt poster child for the city’s revival. —Rick Jordan Address: R. de Mouzinho da Silveira N 228, 4050-417 Porto, PortugalPrice: Doubles from about $142 per night" - Abigail Malbon
